Life as Art
The mature Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom I am proud to share a birthday*, lived his life artfully. His life was inseparable from his art, and his perfectly tailored suits, bowls of fragrant decaying roses, sweet and unearthly nature were as Rilkean as the Sonnets to Orpheus.
If one decides that there is an art, a method to living, I would like to know how my life aesthetically compares, to say, a Persian paradaiza garden. The rulers of the Persian empire, from Cyrus to Darius, often desired to be remembered as gardeners rather than conquerers. The ancient walled-in gardens of naturally are very beautiful, simple and orderly. My life is chaotic. Rather, my inner-life is chaotic and neurotic while the outer-life remains somewhat orderly. But the anguish and confusion of my inner-life has nothing of the grandeur and sublimity of the abyssal opening of Beethoven's Ninth, or an asthmatic eruption in the Drei Orchesterstücke, Op. 6 of Alban Berg. That would only be wishful thinking, to attach some of that glory to my own condition.
If anything, one would admit, my inner-life is most comparable to something like the meaningless squelch of a bass-amp during a Danger Danger soundcheck at the Island Resort & Casino, Menominee County, Upper-Peninsula Michigan.
*I share this birthday with Franco, Kandinsky, Jay-Z, Marisa Tomei and Wink Martindale.
The mature Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom I am proud to share a birthday*, lived his life artfully. His life was inseparable from his art, and his perfectly tailored suits, bowls of fragrant decaying roses, sweet and unearthly nature were as Rilkean as the Sonnets to Orpheus.
If one decides that there is an art, a method to living, I would like to know how my life aesthetically compares, to say, a Persian paradaiza garden. The rulers of the Persian empire, from Cyrus to Darius, often desired to be remembered as gardeners rather than conquerers. The ancient walled-in gardens of naturally are very beautiful, simple and orderly. My life is chaotic. Rather, my inner-life is chaotic and neurotic while the outer-life remains somewhat orderly. But the anguish and confusion of my inner-life has nothing of the grandeur and sublimity of the abyssal opening of Beethoven's Ninth, or an asthmatic eruption in the Drei Orchesterstücke, Op. 6 of Alban Berg. That would only be wishful thinking, to attach some of that glory to my own condition.
If anything, one would admit, my inner-life is most comparable to something like the meaningless squelch of a bass-amp during a Danger Danger soundcheck at the Island Resort & Casino, Menominee County, Upper-Peninsula Michigan.
*I share this birthday with Franco, Kandinsky, Jay-Z, Marisa Tomei and Wink Martindale.
posted by PWS at 9:22 PM
3 Comments:
Lattice of coincidence, PWS: I had just read through my favorite Rilke, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, the poem that ends with:
Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
Ahh yes. "You must change your life". Are you fluent enough in German where you grimace at certain English translations?
I don't read translations from German (I've been in Germany since '89), but I do grimace. Often, long, and spontaneously, independent of language.
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